A few weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to meet an Egyptian acquaintance I had first met briefly as a child in 1974, at my late father’s office. My father had launched a progressive Urdu weekly Al-Fatha and one afternoon in 1974, when I accompanied him to his office (after school), an Arab man heading the information cell of Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in South Asia, visited him.
With the man was his son, Abdallah Amr. Amr and I became friends almost immediately, even though he could hardly speak a word of Urdu. After spending an hour or so talking about cars, comics, kites and maybe even school (in whatever English both he and I knew), we never met again until 10 years later.
In 1984, I joined a local college in Karachi. And here is where I met Amr again. I had largely forgotten about him, but he remembered my name and approached me in the college canteen. Till the early 1980s, students from various Middle Eastern and African countries were a common sight in Pakistani colleges and universities.
How life came full circle for a friend from Egypt
I was delighted to meet him. There was a group of young Arab PLO supporters at the college but Amr was not part of it. This surprised me because I remembered his father being a member of the PLO. As a young man I was rapidly moving to the leftist side of Cold War politics but Amr had turned right.
He told me that in 1982 he had joined the youth-wing of the radical Muslim Brotherhood organisation at a school in Cairo. He was just 15 at the time. He said that he had increasingly begun to disagree with his father who had divorced Amr’s mother in 1981.
In 1983 Amr became a member of Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya. This organisation was formed in Egypt in the mid-1970s and had fought pitched battles with leftist and ‘Nasserite’ student groups on campuses.
Amr escaped from Cairo in late 1983 with a cousin of his when the Egyptian government further intensified its crackdown against radical ‘Islamist’ groups after one such outfit assassinated the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Amr was at the college in Karachi for just a few months and left for the UAE and then Saudi Arabia. At least, that’s what I heard. During the few conversations I had with him at college, I felt that, oddly, he blamed the ‘playboy’ demeanour of his father (that’s what he called it) and his parents’ divorce on his father’s political ideology!
Once when he had accompanied a couple of friends of mine and me to the beach, over rounds of the jolly drink, Amr had snapped at a fellow who had begun to denounce the mujahideen insurgency in Afghanistan. Amr didn’t indulge in drinking nor did he smoke. He almost shouted at the guy: “You immoral shayuei (Arabic for communist), only good to break homes and society!”
The guy instantly retaliated: “And you pious narcissists only good in turning people into robots! Why don’t you go and fight in Afghanistan instead of frolicking with immoral shayuei?”
“Sa’feal! (I will),” Amr yelled back. I calmed him down by suggesting that we go back to talking about cars and comics instead, just the way we had when we first met as children. A week later he came over to my house to say goodbye. He didn’t say where he was going.
Thirty-two years later, in 2016, there he was again coming out of a building adjacent to Karachi’s mammoth Dolmen Mall on the shores of the Clifton Beach. Now clean-shaven and in a smart grey suit and a red tie, he was in Karachi on behalf of a multinational based in Dubai.
I too was entering the same building when I heard a voice shout out my name. It took me a couple of seconds to recognise him but when I did, he hugged me and laughingly said, “Paracha, you grow old now!”
He said he had often followed me through my articles in Dawn and that he was now settled in Dubai with his wife and children. I asked him where he went after bidding farewell in 1984. “Oh, here and there,” he smiled. But then he finally did tell me as we shared a smoke in a shady area just outside the building. Yes, he now smoked.
Amr did go to Saudi Arabia. He attended the King Saud University in Riyadh where he rose to become a leading member of the pro-Gamaa group of Egyptian exiles there. In 1987, he returned to Egypt but was arrested in Cairo for distributing audio-tapes of lectures delivered by the radical Egyptian cleric, Shaykh Abdul Rahman.
Amr told me that he was tortured in jail and then released on bail arranged by the Gamaa. He returned to Saudi Arabia (via Yemen) and was planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets when he received news of his father’s demise. The father had settled in Jordan. Amr returned to Egypt to be with his mother but was immediately arrested (for skipping bail).
He says he was glad he returned to Cairo because an event there completely changed his life for the better. Between 1987 and 1997 he was in and out of jail. He continued to be a member of the Gamaa and was paid a monthly sum of money by the organisation. During one such stint in jail, some of his Gamaa colleagues and he received a pamphlet (in the mail) which was authored by an ideologue of the Gamaa, Karam Zaudi.
In the pamphlet, Zaudi questioned Gamaa’s tactics and political orientation. Amr told me that soon other Gamaa leaders too began to contribute to the intense debate and discourse which developed within the organisation after Zaudi’s pamphlet.
Even more pamphlets arrived, mostly reporting on the nature of the debate which was almost entirely taking place in prison cells between various incarcerated members of the Gamaa. In 2001, Zaudi’s treatises concluded that Gamaa’s radicalism and view of Islam were intransigent and that the organisation needed to become ‘moderate’ and ‘more civil’ and ‘democratic’. Amr was converted to Zaudi’s point-of-view.
Though the Gamaa gave up militancy in 2003, Amr (who was released in 2001) never rejoined the outfit. Instead, on his mother’s urging he completed his MBA from Cairo University, completely shunned politics and then got a job at a media-buying firm.
In 2004, impressed by his work and professional attitude, the firm transferred him to its Dubai office. A few years later, he quit that firm and joined a multinational in that city. He also married a Latvian woman and then financed his mother’s trip from Cairo to Dubai. She now lives with him there.
Just before bidding him yet another goodbye, I finally asked Amr whether he had joined Gamaa because of his parents’ divorce. Amr went quiet for a bit, smiled, straightened his tie and then after putting a hand on my shoulder, replied: ‘Paracha brother, let’s talk about cars and comics instead.” And we actually did.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, October 23rd, 2016